Traffic Splitting with Network Calculus for Mesh Sensor Networks

In many applications of sensor networks, it is essential to ensure that messages are transmitted to their destinations as early as possible and the buffer size of each sensor node is as small as possible. In this paper, we firstly propose a mesh sensor network system model. Based on this system model, the expressions for deriving the delay bound and buffer requirement bound are presented using network calculus. In order to balance traffic load and improve resource utilization, three traffic splitting mechanisms are proposed. The numerical results show that the delay bound and buffer requirement bound are lowered while applying those traffic splitting mechanisms. And thus the performance of the whole sensor network is improved.